Curator: Martina Mrázová

White & Weiss Gallery opens its 2023 programme with Natalie Perkof’s exhibition, an artist of Czech-Ghanaian origin. Her works deal primarily with femininity, dominance, sexuality, spirituality and the relationship between humans and nature. Her solo Slovak exhibition titled Gemini, presents her latest paintings exploring human identity along with the human soul and its conscious and unconscious layers. The exhibition will run until 10 March 2023.

The story of Gemini or the divine twins spans many cultures and centuries. Natalie Perkof associates it with the idea of reclaiming integrity and balance, which she sees as an individual source of inner strength. She perceives the reconciliation of the often contradictory aspects of the personality as a path to the conception of a confident and free being, unrestrained by norms or conventions, drawing strength from within.  Such a being may take the form of a modern goddess who combines the innocence and purity of the Christian Mother with the unfettered sensuality of the Hindu goddess Kali, also seen as one of the icons of the feminist movement. Loose inspirations from mythology, mysticism and Eastern spirituality are syncretically combined with reflections that reach into the realms of feminism and depth psychology. The formal concept of paintings, based on reductive forms of figures seemingly floating in an undetermined time and space of monochromatic colour surfaces underlines the power and poeticism of the artist’s statement.

Natalie Perkof (b. 1979) studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology (2005 – 2007) and at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava (1999 – 2005). Her main focus is figurative painting, but she also does site-specific installations, photography, graphic design, architectural projects and product design. In 2005, she won the Graphic Designer of the Year Award and between 2013 – 2018 she published original calendars. She has exhibited in Prague galleries such as Hunt Kastner, MeetFactory, Kurzor and Galerie U Betlémské kaple. Last year she also participated in the Art Cologne fair. Her works are represented in the Brno City Museum and in many private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad. She works and lives in Brno.